After I bought my mother a compact-disc player and some CDs, she was excited to discover she no longer needed to rewind or fast-forward tapes or move the needle on her record player.
Knowing she was not that technically astute, I called her a few days later to see how she was managing. "Fine. I listened to Shania Twain this morning," she said.
"The whole CD?" I asked.
"No," she replied, "just one side."
I’m bald–well, balding. I like to say "balding" because it sounds more productive. And I don’t like to say I’m losing my hair, because that makes it sound like had I been more responsible, this wouldn’t have happened. "Where’s your hair?" "I lost it. You know me. Where are my keys?"
John is out with his friends and stops by his grandmother’s house for a visit. There’s a bowl of peanuts on the coffee table, and John and his friends start snacking on them. When they’re ready to leave, his friends say, "Nice to meet you, ma’am, and thank you for the peanuts." Grandma says, "You’re welcome. Ever since I lost my dentures, all I can do is suck the chocolate off of them."
The biggest loser at my weight-loss club was an elderly woman. "How’d you do it?" we asked. "Easy," she said. "Every night I take my teeth out at six o’clock."
Even at age 88, my mother was vain about her looks. At a party, an old friend exclaimed, "Edith, you haven’t changed in 20 years."
"Oh," said Mom, horrified. "I hope I didn’t look like this 20 years ago."
"How was your blind date?"
"Terrible! He showed up in a 1932 Rolls-Royce."
"What’s so terrible about that?"
"He was the original owner."
My sister and I decided to reframe a favorite photograph of our mother and father from when they were dating, some 60 years ago. After removing the picture from the frame, I turned it over, hoping to find a date. I didn’t. Instead, my mother had written, "128 lbs."
I have no respect for gangs today. They just drive by and shoot people. At least in the old days, like in West Side Story, the gangs used to dance with each other first.
My grandfather was sipping a beer when he confessed to me he’d drunk more than usual the day before. "What’s more than usual?" I asked.
"A case."
"You can drink a case in a day?!"
"Well," he grumbled defensively, "it doesn’t take all day."
I was feeling pretty creaky after hearing the TV reporter say, "To contact me, go to my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, or try me the old-fashioned way-e-mail."
For her 40th birthday, my wife said, "I’d love to be ten again." So that Saturday, we had a heaping stack of chocolate-chip pancakes, her favorite childhood breakfast. Then we hit the playground and a merry-go-round. We finished the day with a banana split.
"So how did you enjoy being a kid for a day?" I asked.
"Great," she said. "But when I said I wanted to be ten again, I meant my dress size."
Our favorite museum in town displays quilts from around the country. When I visited recently, I asked the woman at the front desk about a senior discount. It wasn’t to be.
"Sir," she said, "this is a quilt museum. We give discounts to teenagers."
My nine-year-old daughter walked in while I was getting ready for work. "What are you doing?" she asked.
"Putting on my wrinkle cream," I answered.
"Oh," she said, walking away. "I thought they were natural."
Recently I sat in a restaurant watching two older men go at it. It quickly grew heated as one of them declared, "I’m so mad, I’m taking you off my pallbearer list!"
My 45-year-old sister was attending the wedding of a childhood friend when she ran into people she hadn’t seen in years. How long exactly? One of them shouted, "Kathy, you got your braces off!"
An elderly man visits the doctor for a checkup. "Mr. Smith, you’re in great shape," says the doctor afterward. "How do you do it?"
"Well," says Mr. Smith, "I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and the good Lord looks out for me. For weeks now, every time I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, he turns the light on for me."
Concerned, the doctor finds Mrs. Smith in the waiting room and tells her what her husband said.
"I don’t think that’s anything to worry about," she says. "And on the bright side, it does explain who’s been peeing in the fridge."
In January, my wife, a physician, met with an elderly patient. "So was Santa good to you?" she asked.
"Real good," he said. "I got an SUV."
"Nice."
"Yeah … Socks, Underwear, and Viagra."
I’ve always been a disappointment. When I was five, I looked down at the crayons I was coloring with and sighed—when I was two, this is not what I saw myself doing at five.
An elderly shopper at our supermarket used a check to buy such items as cotton balls, cotton swabs, powder, and cold cream. On the memo line, she’d written, "Repairs."
I knew that my husband’s hearing had deteriorated after our friend—new to the city— asked where he could meet some singles. "Well," said my husband, "I see them in the Kmart parking lot diving for fries."
"Dear," I intervened. "Singles, not seagulls."